“To know silence perfectly is to know music.”
~ Carl Sandberg

[silence continued]

Silence, while being true, is not the truth. The silence is like the white spathe of the calla lily from which emerges the yellow spadix of truth. The white horn forms a sanctuary where the silent music comes forth and can be heard and appreciated. As the poet Carl Sandburg put it, “To know silence perfectly is to know music.” The mystics know the opposite is also true: to know music perfectly is to know silence. Silence enhances the acoustics of the soul where with practice we learn to hear the song God sings.

All these images for silence– the soil of the soul, the field that holds a treasure, a habit of the heart, the setting for the experiment with truth, the cave of the heart, the white sheathed bract that is the sanctuary for the spadix of truth– all these mixed metaphors lined up one after another like different colored boxcars, are meant to suggest that silence is not only a means for self-understanding and the condition for prayer but is itself a unique kind of prayer and a distinctive kind of care– silence created for and lived as radical openness and availability, as deep listening and reverent receptivity, as blessed vulnerability and conscious contemplative engagement, as compassionate presence, and as awareness of the interconnectedness of all life.

As a unique kind of prayer, silence cradles the stillness that the fourteenth century English mystic Walter Hilton called “an holy idleness and a rest most busy.” What makes the idleness holy, of course, is God, and our simple but sincere desire to be with God. What makes the silence holy, what makes the stillness prayer, is that we meet God there. In the silent listening and in the listening stillness we wait quietly for God and then patiently with God. We do nothing with God. We are consciously still in the presence of God where we let go our heart.

What makes the rest busy, that is, what makes the seeming inaction active, creative, fecund, and potentially transformative, is the experience of being part of what Hilton calls “the free spiritual working of love” that is happening in and through the silence and that evokes a response from us. But just as the silence is not the truth, God is not the silence. God is not the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. God is in the silence, speaking. We are in the silence, listening. God is in the silence loving. We are in the silence allowing ourselves to be loved.

PRACTICE:

Today or tonight, be like the calla lily. Heighten the acoustics of your soul. Listen for the silent music.

Photograph: Loren Webster.
http://www.lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/2009/05/